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Recently, various policies have been implemented in Saudi Arabia to reform science teaching at K-12 levels in order to focus on critical thinking, inquiry-based learning, and problem solving. Research is needed to explore the adequacy of teacher preparation programs to determine whether these programs sufficiently prepare Saudi science teachers to teach according to these new reforms. This study explores the challenges that Saudi pre-service science teachers face in these higher education programs. Results indicated that graduates of the programs studied were satisfied with their experiences; however, various concerns were expressed by some pre-service teachers regarding the theory-practice gap between their university coursework and field experiences, and the supervision structures and functions in place for the professional experiences component. Modifications to the teacher preparation programs are suggested in order to address these concerns and to successfully enact reforms in science education in Saudi Arabia.

The purpose of this paper is to report the design and evaluation of an inter-university collaborative project entitled “Blended learning for building student-teachers’ capacity to learn and teach science-related interdisciplinary subjects.” The project is a response of the science education faculty of three Hong Kong tertiary institutes to the challenge of catering to the diversity of academic backgrounds among student-teachers.

E-learning modules have been produced covering four content domains of science. These modules are designed based on the 5E learning model and are delivered to students using the learning management system provided by Moodle. The design of the modules is iterative, based on the evaluation of three consecutive rounds of trials through student surveys, and focus group interviews with students and course lecturers.

The evaluation findings indicate positive outcomes for certain attributes such as conceptual understanding, eagerness and confidence in learning science, and metacognitive reflection on students’ own learning. There are challenges to be met in relation to instructional design to cater for the diversity of student abilities, and enhance motivation in self-directed learning.

The project indicates the ways to develop students’ basic science knowledge in a mixed-ability setting through the design of self-directed e-learning modules blended with their major courses and possible measures to address the limitations of such design.

The study represents a conscious effort for the science teacher education faculty of different universities to pull together to tackle a perennial teaching and learning problem. The findings provide important insights into possible ways to blend e-learning with face-to-face learning approaches to better cater to the needs of science learners with mixed abilities to prepare them for interdisciplinary teaching.

This study aims to understand the extent to which a faculty development program that includes a week-long course design experience followed by sustained support changes new faculty's perceptions, beliefs and teaching practices. The authors employed the teacher professional knowledge and skill (TPK&S) framework and characteristics of effective educational development interventions to drive the program development, implementation and assessment.

This study utilized a mixed methods approach. Data sources include pre-/mid-/post-program responses to a validated survey, pre-/post-program course syllabi analyzed using a validated rubric and pre-/post-classroom observations collected using the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) instrument.

Findings indicate transformative effects for participants' beliefs about their teaching and changes to their instructional practices. Significant and practical effects were observed across different portions of the program for increases in participants' self-efficacy, endorsement of a conceptual change approach toward teaching and perceptions of institutional support. Participants produced more learning-focused syllabi and many moved toward more student-centered instructional approaches in their teaching practices.

Due to the voluntary nature of the new faculty development program, this study may have been limited by participant self-selection bias and differential sample sizes for the study's individual measures. Future research should consider designs which maximize faculty participation in measurement across all data sources.

This study addresses shortcomings in prior studies which utilized limited data sources to measure intervention impact and answers the call for more rigorous research to obtain a more complete picture of instructional development in higher education.

This paper explores the idea of the prudent entrepreneurial self, through re-conceptualizing prudence into the domain of entrepreneurial education, to unite the two processes of becoming enterprising and entrepreneurial. It is argued that developing a capacity for prudence among graduates involves past, present and conjecture forms of knowledge that the authors find in the interplay between individuation and social awareness.

Building on Palmer's idea of wholeness, the authors discuss six poles of paradoxes in entrepreneurial education and in conjunction establish a philosophical argument for the idea of stimulating the development of prudence as fundamentally important to contemporary notions of entrepreneurial education.

The paper presents a model to develop a schema that moves students towards becoming prudent entrepreneurial selves. The model rests on two interrelated developmental processes – individuation and social awareness – conditional for developing the three forms of knowledge (past, present and conjecture) that makes up prudence where developing prudence is a means to handle or cope with the unknown.

This paper argues that for enterprise and entrepreneurship education to realize their potential contributions, both the relationships between each field and the overarching purpose that ties the fields together need to be rethought, and the poles of paradoxes need to be connected to further develop both fields and creating wholeness for the emerging scholarly discipline.

To educate towards the prudent entrepreneurial self means educating towards an unknown end where student development aims to meet both the objectives of individual development and the growth in social awareness required to handle the changing nature of contemporary society.

This study philosophically conceives a united enterprise and entrepreneurship education landscape in which deeper student learning makes possible the notion of the prudent entrepreneurial self.

This paper aims to determine the impact of mentorship on the development of self-directedness among beginner teachers in their initial years of teaching.

The researcher adopted a positivist paradigm to explore the situation of concern. Quantitative research was conducted, involving the collection and analysis of numerical data. Two closed-ended structured questionnaires were utilised, derived from the 40-item self-directed learning readiness scale (SDLRS) developed by Fisher and King, and a pre-determined questionnaire by Glazerman focused on the first-year teaching experience, induction and mentoring of beginner teachers.

Beginner teachers merely relying on the knowledge obtained from their studies is insufficient to achieve a satisfactory level of self-directedness when starting a teaching career. Most beginner teachers faced significant challenges in their early years of teaching due to the absence of mentoring support. In addition, most indicated that they resume their teaching duties and rely on their district for general support, guidance and orientation. Finally, the results have shown that mentoring positively impacts beginner teachers’ self-directedness.

The first limitation was that this study was narrowed to one South Africa University part-time B.Ed honours students working as beginner teachers in different provinces at primary and secondary schools. As a result, the findings of this research might be interpreted by some critics as one-sided and not representative of the views of most beginner teachers in South Africa who are working. The second limitation of this study is the sample size. In this study, 222 responses were received. As a result, the findings of this research might be considered not representative of the target sample size.

The presence and effective implementation of mentoring programmes in schools can positively impact beginner teachers' professional development and retention during their first years of teaching.

We contend that our research holds significance for international readership as it aims to garner attention towards potential research endeavours in diverse settings concerning mentorship programs for beginner teachers, specifically promoting self-directed learning. Our research offers opportunities to compare our findings with studies conducted in more comprehensive, comparative contexts and foster research possibilities in broader, contrasting contexts.

Based on the findings of this research, the availability and effective use of mentoring programmes would significantly affect beginner teachers' self-directedness, improve their retention rate and alleviate their teaching challenges. This study was the first research on the perceptions of the influence of mentoring on the self-directedness of beginner teachers.

This paper aims to specifically focus on the challenges that human resource management (HRM) leaders and departments in contemporary organisations face due to close interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) (primarily robots) and human workers especially at the team level. It further discusses important potential strategies, which can be useful to overcome these challenges based on a conceptual review of extant research.

The current paper undertakes a conceptual work where multiple streams of literature are integrated to present a rather holistic yet critical overview of the relationship between AI (particularly robots) and HRM in contemporary organisations.

We highlight that interaction and collaboration between human workers and robots is visible in a range of industries and organisational functions, where both are working as team members. This gives rise to unique challenges for HRM function in contemporary organisations where they need to address workers' fear of working with AI, especially in relation to future job loss and difficult dynamics associated with building trust between human workers and AI-enabled robots as team members. Along with these, human workers' task fulfilment expectations with their AI-enabled robot colleagues need to be carefully communicated and managed by HRM staff to maintain the collaborative spirit, as well as future performance evaluations of employees. The authors found that organisational support mechanisms such as facilitating environment, training opportunities and ensuring a viable technological competence level before organising human workers in teams with robots are important. Finally, we found that one of the toughest challenges for HRM relates to performance evaluation in teams where both humans and AI (including robots) work side by side. We referred to the lack of existing frameworks to guide HRM managers in this concern and stressed the possibility of taking insights from the computer gaming literature, where performance evaluation models have been developed to analyse humans and AI interactions while keeping the context and limitations of both in view.

Our paper is one of the few studies that go beyond a rather general or functional analysis of AI in the HRM context. It specifically focusses on the teamwork dimension, where human workers and AI-powered machines (robots) work together and offer insights and suggestions for such teams' smooth functioning.

This study aims to investigate how primary teachers, when taking part in digital didactic design (D³) workshops at the Digital Laboratory Centre at the university, develop their insights about how digital tools can be designed and further used in their teaching of science. The research question addresses how D³ can be used to develop primary teachers’ knowledge about teaching science with digital technologies.

During two semesters, 14 primary science teachers from three different schools participated in an in-service course at the university. Five D³ workshops lasting 4 h each were conducted with the aim to analyze, design and implement digital tools based on the needs of teachers and students. This includes discussions about the technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) framework and further recommendations about how to choose, design, implement and evaluate digital tools for different teaching and learning situations. In between the workshops, the teachers were told to reflect on their experiences with colleagues and students and share their ideas and reflections to support collegial learning.

The results indicate that D³ has an opportunity to promote deep learning experiences with a framework that encourages teachers and researchers to study, explore and analyze the applied designs-in-practice, where teachers take part in the design process. This study further indicates that having teachers explicitly articulates their reasoning about designing digital applications to engage students’ learning that seems important for exploring the types of knowledge used in these design practices and reflecting on aspects of their teaching with digital technologies likely to influence their TPACK.

This research indicates that the increasing prevalence of information communication technology offers challenges and opportunities to the teaching and learning of science and to the scientific practice teachers might encounter. It offers solutions by investigating how primary teachers can design their own digital technology to meet students’ science learning needs. One limitation might be that the group of 14 teachers cannot be generalized to represent all teachers. However, this study gives implications for how to work with and for teachers to develop their knowledge of digital technologies in teaching.

As this project shows teachers can take an active part in the digital school development and as such become producer of knowledge and ideas and not only become consumers in the jungle of technical applications that are implemented on a school level. Therefore, it might well be argued that in science teaching, paying more careful attention to how teachers and researchers work together in collaborative settings, offers one way of better valuing science teachers’ professional knowledge of practice. As such, an implication is that digital applications are not made “for” teachers but instead “with” and “by” teachers.

The society puts high demands om teachers’ knowledge and competencies to integrate digital technologies into their daily practices. Building on teachers’ own needs and concerns, this project addresses the challenge for teachers as a community to be better prepared for and meet the societal challenge that digitalization means for schools.

Across the field of science education, knowledge about the relation between teachers’ use of digital technology and how it might (or might not) promote students’ learning offers access to ideas of how to design and implement teacher professional development programs. This offers enhanced communication opportunities between schools and universities regarding school facilities and expectations of technology to improve teachers’ experiences with integrating technology into their learning and teaching. This pragmatic approach to research creates theory and interventions that serve school practice but also produces challenges for design-based researchers.

Knowledge sharing in research communities has been considered indispensable to progress in science. The aim of this paper is to analyze the mechanisms restricting knowledge sharing in science. It considers three categories of academia–industry knowledge transfer and a range of individual and contextual variables as possible predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions.

A unique empirical data sample was collected based on a survey among 212 life science researchers affiliated with universities and other non-profit research institutions. A rich descriptive analysis was followed by binominal regression analysis, including relevant checks for the robustness of the results.

Researchers in academia who actively collaborate with industry are more likely to omit relevant content from publications in co-authorship with other academic researchers; delay their co-authored publications, exclude relevant content during public presentations; and deny requests for access to their unpublished and published knowledge.

This study informs policymakers that different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions are predicted by different individual and contextual factors, which suggests that policies concerning academia–industry knowledge and technology transfer should be tailored to contextual specificities.

This study contributes new predictors of knowledge-sharing restrictions to the literature on academia–industry interactions, including outcome expectations, trust and sharing climate. This study augments the knowledge management literature by separately considering the roles of various academic knowledge-transfer activities in instigating different types of knowledge-sharing restrictions in scientific research.

Goal 4.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) explicitly frames education as an enabler of change and a means to achieve all SDGs. This study aims to explore the nature and culture of science as an academic discipline and its capacity for the integration of education for sustainable development (ESD).

Drawing upon interviews with academics working in a Life Sciences Department (n = 11), focus groups with students (n = 21) and observations from lectures, laboratory sessions and field trips, the study advances a number of recommendations for the integration of ESD in Science Education programs.

Findings point to the nature and structure of scientific knowledge and the culture of science as articulated by study participants. The study provides a number of recommendations for the integration of ESD in Science Education programs including a greater emphasis on inquiry-based learning, enhancing ESD themes in science-related modules to teach for sustainability and adopting a department wide strategy that promotes ESD.

This study argues that ESD practitioners need to be cognizant of the nature and culture of the discipline area – as a particular discipline propagates a specific culture – encapsulating ways of being, thinking, acting and communicating, which can have implications for the integration of ESD.